Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Pepsi-Cola World, February 1960.

The design firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar established their reputation for brilliant corporate identity work with one of their earliest clients, Pepsi-Cola.

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Tony Palladino worked for Siegel & Gale in the mid-1970s — one of the accounts he worked on was Conrail, a new railroad organization created by the federal government.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection, Box 40 Folder 11, Xerox booklet, 1960s.

Which ladder will you climb at Xerox?

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Rummaging through some old SVA publications, we came across this invitation for an unveiling of the XIX Olympiad graphics, featuring Lance Wyman’s classic symbol for the games.

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Steven Heller Collection: Identity Programs by Noel Martin, identity for Xomox Corporation, manufacturers of valves, actuators and surgical implants.

Noel Martin was a renown self-taught typographer and designer who studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He later became an instructor there and was the long-time designer for the Cincinnati Art Museum, as well as a prolific free-lance designer. Martin was celebrated for modernizing museum graphics and industrial trade catalogs. In 1953, he was featured in MoMA’s landmark design exhibition, Four American Designers, along with Herbert Bayer, Leo Lionni, and Ben Shahn. His spiral-bound self-promotional piece, Identity Programs, presents some of his iconic minimalist logos.

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This detail for a 1956 poster for the Cartoonist & Illustrators School by George Tscherny. Rebranded as the School of Visual Arts later that year, the designer had a long and fruitful relationship with the institution.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Drawer 20, Folders 10. Seymour Chwast, logo label for Push Pin; on the reverse of item P16 in his recent donation to the Archives

Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast, with an introduction by Steve Heller and an essay by Paula Scher, came out last April. A lively conversation around the book and the work it included built up in a comments thread at Design Observer last week, which brought in Scher and Heller, along with Michael Bierut, Armin Vit, Lorraine Wild, and others. Some unhappy commenters questioned the significance of his work, and this lead to a pretty interesting consideration of the concept of “dated” art (my favorite writing on this subject is I. A. Richards’ essay “Permanence as a Criterion,” which finds both “dated” and “timeless” problematic from the start).

This label, stuck authoritatively on the back of a mounted board as a bit of corporate identity — complete with the overrule, grotesk “Group Incorporated,” and high-contrast logotype — exploits its context to achieve a kind of reflexive wit, a kind of acknowledgment of what is being put over, that gives it a unifying effect (it is at once more than, and no more than, a “bit of corporate identity”). This is achieved with an unusually unaffected air — a combination that I think has always characterized Chwast’s work.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Box 2A, Folder 26 and Box 25, Folder 5

An envelope showing the logo for slider chain Krystal, ca 1980s, designed by Chermayeff & Geismar. Doggie bag follows.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection, Box 44, Folder 5 — Norlin Annual Report 1974.

From the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection comes this Norlin Annual Report shaped like an album cover. Inside, along with the actual report, is the record Norlin Salutes The Music in America, which includes works by Morton Gould, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and William Schumann.

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George Tschnery Collection, Grace Annual Report 1985 first quarter.

We’ve just received our next batch of materials from George Tscherny: a wonderful case study of his identity work for W.R. Grace. Video after the jump!

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Milton Glaser Collection, Series 2: Box 106, Folder 9

Milton Glaser designed this irregularly-shaped, cut-out menu in 1973 for Galeonen Bar, at the Plaza Hamburg hotel. Their vintage cocktail menu follows.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Box 13, Folder 13 — Crafton Graphic Company, Inc. Prang 1969.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what a Prang is, your worries are over.

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We’ve just received the first installment of our new George Tscherny Collection, which includes gorgeous modular displays for Pan Am terminals, corporate style manuals, and branded promo items and service uniforms.

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